"rise + fall" Exhibit Opening

Photos by Daniel KawahThe Betty Mae Kramer Gallery

This past Friday evening, The Betty Mae Kramer Gallery held the opening reception for rise + fall, an exhibition of new works by Adjoa Burrowes and Lendeh Sherman. Organized by Kramer Gallery Curator Amina K. Cooper, rise + fall addresses current social and environmental issues through exploratory mixed media processes and installation based works.

The Artist left to right: Adjoa Burrowes & Lendeh Sherman

Words from the artist:

Given the opportunity, would you willingly try on the experience of someone else’s perceptions, attitudes, life experience, physical conditions and emotions? Like an adventure, filled with the possibility of gaining insight and understanding into that particular body and mind. [Imagine a highly-advanced, fashionable technology, similar to The Point of View Gun in the film, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Could you imagine how different the world would be with a technology that automatically causes someone to experience another person’s point of view?]

The intention behind the portrait series on silk, an on-going project, is to show the emotional turmoil experienced by parents of their unarmed children and relatives who have been the victims of police brutally, violence, and profiling and how empathy plays a role in having a progressive conversation about race and justice. Contemplating the suffering of these individuals has helped me understand my own fears, where I often think of the relationship between my brother and mother and how she could very well wear the pain of these parents. The subject of race can be divisive when we are not open to listening and speaking with the intent of understanding.

Four of the portraits are hand painted using silk dyes and two portraits are of the dye-sublimation printing process. The beaded flower designs symbolize a distraction from the gamut expressions of grief, as well as the remembrance of life. The delicate, fragile yet tensile silk fiber and beaded patterns contrast with the heavy subject, and the scale speaks to the engulfing emotions of Tracy Martin, Geneva Reed-Veal, Samaria Rice, Lezley McSpadden, Esaw Garner, Gloria Darden and many more who all share common threads.